Ship
From Sega Retro
| Ship |
|---|
| System(s): Sega Mega Drive |
| Developer: Technopop |
| Genre: Shoot-'em-Up |
| Number of players: 1-2 |
| Status of prototype(s): Source code found and compiled, cartridge found and dumped |
| Sound driver: GEMS |
Ship is an unreleased Sega Mega Drive game by Technopop. Two very early builds of the game have been preserved - the first of which was compiled from source code unearthed by drx of Hidden-Palace.org on September 24, 2007 as part of a development kit for GEMS,[1] and the second of which was dumped from an EPROM cartridge with a Sega of America visitor sticker sent to Modern Vintage Gamer on December 21, 2020. There are byte differences between both ROMs, but are otherwise the same game.
Gameplay
The game is very simple in design, taking inspiration from Space War. The player controls a ship similar to the one in Asteroids. 
accelerates while the 
and 
allow the ship to turn. When held down, 
activates a shield, and 
allows the ship to fire. Ships are manipulated by the gravitational pull of a star in the centre of the screen, and if a ship touches this star, it will be destroyed.
The game defaults to two-players with five lives each. There is a one-player mode in the prototype, however as there are no on-screen enemies the only thing that can occur is death. There are no sounds and the graphics are minimal, however numerous physics and gameplay features can be altered via the options screen, including reversing the gravity or arming each player with infinite lives.
History
According to Technopop founder Randel Reiss, Ship was designed similarly to Space War as he has been a fan of the original arcade game. In Fall of 1990, Ken Balthaser Sr., then-VP of Development for Sega of America, asked Reiss, as the first US-based developer for the Mega Drive, if he could make a sample game for general distribution, in source form, to the growing development community. With extremely limited documentation of the console, Reiss was able to fully program Ship with a Sega logo, title screen, menus, sprite rotation/scaling and two-player gameplay. The title screen originated as conceptual artwork by Gary Jones, who also created conceptual artwork for Spider-Man vs. The Kingpin and Zero Tolerance.
After completing the demo, Reiss put the game onto an EPROM cartridge and presented it to Sega of America. Having received visitor stickers from dozens of prior visits, Reiss placed a visitor sticker on the cartridge as a joke, and it fit like an official cartridge label. Sega purchased the source code from Reiss and distributed Ship as a sample game with development kits, one of which would be unearthed by drx in 2007.
The original cartridge was then sent to Piko Interactive, and was later purchased as part of a larger auction lot by a man known as "John" in 2018. Around December 2020, John emailed Modern Vintage Gamer about the cartridge and sent the cartridge to him so it can be dumped. When contacted about it via email, Reiss confirmed that the cartridge was indeed his work, and was the only cartridge ever made of Ship.[2]
ROM dump status
| System | Hash | Size | Build Date | Source | Comments | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 |
|
128kB | Compiled source code |  (24 kB) (info)
|
||||||||||
|
|
512kB | 1990-05 | EPROM cartridge | (15 kB) (info)
|
Page |
External links
- Hidden palace release page (source code version)
- Video about the cartridge by Modern Vintage Gamer
